Do you ever get the urge to simply change things up a bit? I did today, and I don’t know if this spur of the moment type of day will stick or if it’ll last until I open my eyes in the morning. I cleaned up in the administrative sense that may, hopefully, give me more time to do what I should be doing and what I want to be doing. It’s hard coalescing the should’s and the want’s, but I’m trying to anyway. What did I change? One of my biggest time sinks, both directly and indirectly, is all the web reading I do through the RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years. You have no idea how many hours I spend a week simply scanning headlines and never actually reading anything. That’s insanely unproductive and wasteful. Instead, I chose the few sites I really like and subscribed to their newsletters, at least those that offered them. I’ll see if this saves me any time. If it does, great! I bought more books yesterday and I still have a lot of books left to read, so I hope I get to them soon.

The next thing I simplified was my OmniFocus projects list. I now only have 33 projects (I don’t remember what I had before, but it might’ve been close to 50), and about 260 action items, down from over 700. I don’t think I’m done weeding and culling and organizing this yet, though, so it might still go down more. What’s left over makes sense to me, and it has given me a greater focus as to what I want out of life right now. Many of my projects naturally breed other projects that I want to have on my list because they’re life changing type of projects. But I’m not there yet. I’m still reaching for the stars on a few things, and I’m failing.

I wasn’t able to take the pack test today because my scheduled physical is still a few weeks away, and I can’t take it beforehand. So I spent all day today watching Gilmore Girls and rethinking what I want out of my life. I’ve found it dangerous to have all this time to think (just look at my weekends), so I bought wine and tried to forget about my life for a bit. It didn’t work. I almost cancelled my blog today. I really wanted to; it felt right. I’m going to cancel it come September, as in I’m not going to renew it. I’m going to finish out the year. I set out to write for a year, and I intend to see it through, no matter how much I don’t want to, and right now, I don’t want to. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know what I want to do, but as I’ve learned, I need more than just wanting to do something. I need to motivate myself to do something, and so I went back and reorganized and fiddled with my OmniFocus task list.

I feel like I’m going around in circles. At least my house is clean.

I take my pack test tomorrow, and I don’t know if I’m ready. I haven’t worked out all week, and I feel like I’m overreacting just a little bit, but it’s not like I’m going to fail it. I’m not in that bad of shape. I remember back in 2012 right before I was going to take my first pack test, I ran a couple of 5k’s at my sister’s ranch and then I found out at the test that we weren’t allowed to run it. I haven’t ran a 5k since. I’ll be fine, though. Maybe I don’t feel in shape because I haven’t worked out all week and I forgot what it feels like to move.

I figured out the kinks to my Windows 8.1 Pro deployment for the teachers, and all they have to do is click on the “Install” button and leave for a few hours and let all my hard work do its thing. It’s so fucking cool you guys. I had to integrate three different services, read a lot, watch a lot of videos, experiment, tweak, test, and BAM, I got this thing working just the way I want it to be. I’m sorry but that’s cool and that excites me so much. Now I just have to build the student images and task sequences and test those out and start massively deploying Windows 8 to all our computers. So. Much. Fun.

I’ve not been doing much of anything this week, hell, the past two weeks, but I feel good about it. I’m actually eager to start doing nothing, and it’s making me enthusiastic about a few things I didn’t think I’d be enthusiastic about. For example, I kind of want to go on a book shopping spree and buy a bunch of random books and start reading more than one book at a time. I’m so boringly structured that I have to read one book at a time, but I want to change that and start reading more than one book at a time. I guess I’m thinking aloud here, but that’s just something I’ve been thinking about. That and buying more music and watching a lot of TV.

I’ve been watching a lot of Gilmore Girls on Netflix and the number of references spewed out per episode is outstanding. I’ve been pausing the show just to look something up on Wikipedia, and then I’ve made notes of those references, and I’m actually watching episodes of TV from the ‘60s just because it was mentioned briefly in one episode. This reminds me of college and high school, when I didn’t know anything and I felt insecure about that so I would start cramming everything I overheard and wrote down and then I learned what I missed and I loved it all. That’s how I was able to get through the first year of college and how I became friends with my best friend sophomore year. We fell in love with samurai movies and that’s what we bonded over. So cool.

Anyways… because of this very passive lifestyle I’m living right now, life is kind of slow and uneventful. I’m sure things will start picking up shortly. Fire season is upon us!

It’s such a relief not being beholden to anything. Life, granted it’s just one day of life, has never felt so quiet, and that’s a good thing. It’s relaxing and rejuvenating. This entry is really the only thing I’m holding myself to, and that’s more than enough for me right now. That guilt I thought I’d feel and that I used to feel is not there anymore. Now, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s a thing I’m keeping my eye on right now. I don’t want to erase all the progress I’ve made since September, but I also don’t want to lose my mind.

Work is going well. Today was the last day of school, and I also cracked Zero-Touch Installation with System Center Configuration Manager. Finally. What this means is that I can deploy Windows 8.1 to all my machines without actually touching the machines. That means I can send out a command from my office computer on Friday before I leave, come back on Monday and find that most, if not all, of the computers I wanted to upgrade have been upgraded. That makes me feel so powerful. This upgrade project just got a whole lot easier and even more amazing because I can customize the sequence of how this OS is installed. I can tell it which apps to install, what to backup and restore once the upgrade is complete, and a whole host of other things. No one man should have all this power!

I woke up at 5:30 AM today. That’s my new wakeup time, one I’m at least testing out. You know what? I feel great. I woke up well-rested and ready to start my day. I lived my day well and without any crankiness. I also didn’t work out because I didn’t feel like it. Now that’s something I’m going to have to keep my eye on. It’s far easier not to workout than to workout, and I don’t want to find myself one month from now 5-10 lbs heavier and completely out of the exercise habit. I still need to keep myself focused on some things; I’m just trying not to hurt myself in the process.

Yes, life is short, and I really don’t want to live it in mediocrity, but I’ve really only been out of my regular routine for a month. The previous eight months were amazing, but the time before that wasn’t as crazy, and I lived my life relatively happily. The reason I was so hard on myself is no longer a reason, and now I have to regroup and refocus and rediscover how I want to live my life again. My novel is done and fire season is almost here and work is going to be fun and I’m trying new things and I’m seeing what works and what doesn’t. Experimentation is fun. I can’t to find out what new things stick around and what old things I can bring back and see how all that makes my life look and feel. Stay tuned.

One of the big things on my mind lately has been the question of why I feel the need to do so much on a daily basis. I talked about yesterday how I’m trying to push most of my tasks to the weekdays so I can have the weekends to myself. I’m simplifying my weekdays so my weekdays aren’t overloaded with stuff I’m implicitly promising to myself. I’m drastically simplifying my morning and nightly routines, and I’m trying to make more room for both fun and rest. I’m obsessively organizing my OmniFocus lists with tasks and projects that I hope cover all the important areas of my life, but I’m going to try to do them in a more lenient way by doing them when I feel like it. Simple, right?

For example, I didn’t workout today because I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel like it because I was tired all day and hungover from the four bottles of wine I drank this weekend, and I was hungry, really really hungry. I don’t want to punish myself for not doing something, and I’m going to try to be nicer to myself. Now that I’m finished with my novel, I’m going to lay it aside for a while so I can spend more of my time reading and hopefully come up with good ideas to make the novel better. I also subscribed to the New Yorker today, and I want to spend more time reading these issues cover to cover on a weekly basis.

The first eight months of this blog were amazing. I’ve never been as productive as I was during that time, and I’m so proud of all the work I accomplished. I got a job, I finished my novel, I drove to California and back, I wrote non-stop for 267 days, and I did one of the hardest workout programs for over 200 days. Now it’s summer and I want to relax before fire season starts. School’s out, and I need to upgrade a couple hundred computers to Windows 8.1, and I need to figure out my next steps. There’s still a lot of stuff I want to do, but for most of that, time is not of the essence. I want to slow down and really figure this out.

This blog barely gets any hits nowadays; I’m lucky if I get one reader during a week. I know that’s because the quality is virtually nonexistent, and that’s okay. I’m mostly writing this for myself and my own cathartic experiences. Maybe my words have helped people or will help them, I don’t know. I just know they have helped me, and that was the point. Maybe by giving myself more time to relax and maybe read, then maybe that rest will rejuvenate me and my writing will improve. Until then, I just have to take each entry one day at a time until that fire inside my belly reignites and compels me to do something amazing.

More of the same today. Scratch that. I worked a lot in OmniFocus today, actually, and I converted a lot of stale Someday/Maybe items into actual projects that I intend to work on and actually get done within the coming weeks and months. I’ve had “Travel the world” on there for who knows how long, and now I’m going to hunker down and see how I can check this project off. Of course, I’m going to have to break it down into smaller and doable tasks, but that’s the exciting part. I’m also breaking up my super long wish list into their own projects or adding them into other projects. For some projects, I’m going to need to buy stuff to help me get them done, and it’s super nice and convenient to see these items grouped within the project instead of a catch-all list. This is all an attempt to re-organize my life in an attempt to contain all those sand-slipping-through-the-cracks projects and tasks.

I’ve been splurging and having fun and it’s really fun. I’m refocusing a lot of my weekend tasks and converting them into weekday tasks so I can truly have my weekends to myself. I like not being beholden to anything during the weekends, and I think this is a necessary first step toward actually living my life in a fun and interesting way. Slow and steady wins, after all. Again, I’ve been spending a lot of the day watching Gilmore Girls, but when I haven’t been, I’ve been drinking or trying to get some work done because I knew it would have felt good. And it did! Tomorrow I’m going to finally (!!!) subscribe to the New Yorker because it’s $6 for a 12 week subscription (with a valid .edu email address, which I have!), and I’m going to incorporate that into my routine somehow. Getting it read and whatnot. I’m considering — considering! — cutting my writing task in the morning and instead focusing more on reading. I enjoy writing later in the day, and I simply might do it then. I’ll see, though. Scientific method is on the mind.

I’m cutting back on subscriptions to help me save some money. I’m going to spend a lot of money this month on firefighting gear, and I know I can’t be living the way I’ve been living and expect to pay off my debts in a timely manner. I really want that Goruck 2 backpack because it’s perfect for both firefighting and general travel, and read the first paragraph as to why the latter reason is important and attractive to me. I’m frustrated and sad with my life and I know I can do a lot better and I’m almost 30 and I need to grab life by the balls and get what I want. It’s hard hard hard, but it’ll be worth it if I just keep my feet moving and check off all those tasks from OmniFocus. Because the life I want is right there for the taking. I just gotta want it badly enough, and I do.

I decided today should be one of those days where I let loose and have some fun and eat some food I usually don’t eat and drink wine and order pizza and eat ice cream and lie in bed all day watching TV. It’s been marvelous, and I don’t feel guilty or anything, but I might tomorrow when I feel bloated and fat and unhealthy. My Discover card last night increased my credit limit by over $2,000 because I’ve been such a great customer and I manage my credit very well that I almost spent over $400 on a new backpack and accessories. I still might, actually, because it’s for firefighting and fire season is almost here, and I don’t want to use my very crappy Walmart duffel bag this summer. Instead, I would like to have a quality bag with me, but of course this is all me trying to justify a very expensive bag. Why do I go toward expensive items? Because I love quality, and I don’t usually buy myself that much so I think I deserve something practical and cool like this. Don’t you think?

I’m watching Gilmore Girls and this show makes me wish I was a smarter teenager and that I had really smart people around me at all times. I know it’s a show and I know these lines are written by smart people and performed by talented actors, but damn, don’t I wish I could talk like them and have friends that talk like them. Life would be so much more fun and interesting. I’m really enjoying drinking wine and buying stuff — I just bought a Depeche Mode album because Depeche Mode — because I usually don’t allow myself to do stuff like this. It is becoming somewhat more regular, but maybe that’s a good thing? I had a great and productive week, and spending Saturdays like this might be my new routine. I need it. Also, it’s not like I’m struggling with money or anything. I have a good job, and I’m responsible with all my bills, and I don’t have a TV or video game consoles and I don’t buy any extravagant clothes or go out to eat every day or anything irresponsible like that. Every now and then I buy music and apps and I buy more food than I should, but it’s fun! Right?

i have lists of things I want to buy, and if I bought everything on there (minus the books), would I be happy? Would I not add anything more to it? I don’t know. That’s a good question, right? Would this cycle ever end? So it’s good that I splurge every now and then, but I also shouldn’t buy everything I want at the moment I want them. That’s just silly. But I’m listening to this Depeche Mode album — Some Great Reward — and it’s sooooo good and I’m enjoying my purchasing decision. People are people so why should it be/You and I should get along so awfully?

Also, I emailed her because I missed her today, but I’m 99.9% confident she’ll never email me back. So that’s where I’m at tonight.

Montana is wearing me down. I didn’t show my drama class my movies from college because I was stupid enough to ask them if they wanted to watch them. They, of course, didn’t, like the fucking useless pieces of shit they are. I’m sorry, I’m a little bit buzzed right now. I bought two different bottles of Pinot Noir because I’m going to start cataloguing all the different brands I can find and write notes about the ones I like the most. I don’t want to include their price because of this video. But wine, especially Pinot Noir, gets me super buzzed super quickly, and my filter is taking a break right now, and I just want to get all of my feeeeeeeelings out of my system.

Kids fucking suck. High school students who would rather not do anything than something fucking suck. The whole fucking town this school is located is too small. The whole state of Montana is too small. I don’t like how everyone knows each other. I thought I would like that, shit, I did like that when I first moved up here, but now, after living here for a few years now, I don’t like it. I like my privacy and my anonymity. It’s crazy how some teachers have seen some of these high schools grow up since the time they were kindergarteners. That’s insane. And sad, in a sense. These kids only know one school and one small town an the same fucking people. There’s a huge world out there.

I need to travel more. I need to get the hell out of this school, this town, this damn state. I miss California, but I want to go East. I don’t know. I am buzzed right now. I have no filter. I might regret all of this later. Who cares, right? This entry might be educational. We all might fucking learn something about me. I was soooo ready to show them my movies from college. I really wanted to show them, but they wanted to go outside and enjoy their last Friday of the school year. I told them no, and they became these stupid little snotty bitches because of it. I tried to tell them what YouTube videos they wanted to watch, and we watched some fucking stupid videos of some guys making trick shots. This is the shit they want to watch? What the fuck? That was stupid. So I showed them this videomy best friend Will wrote, and they didn’t like it. That pissed me the fuck off. We screened their films yesterday, and if I’m honest, they all sucked, and they’re telling me they didn’t like that video? Fuck them. Fuck them all to hell.

I miss film school and college and all my friends. I miss being around people with taste and a great work ethic. I miss people who would rather create something than consume like fucking leeches. And I fucking miss people my own damn age. Hanging around kids all the time has driven me fucking insane. Sorry if there are any typos or grammatical errors. If there are, please email fuckoff at youdumbbitch.com. Thank you.

We finally screened all of our drama students’ fairy tale adaptations in class today, and they were super fun and adorable and good. I’m very proud of all of them, and I’m so glad we were all able to pull this off in one very short and very haphazard quarter. School ends on Tuesday, but since Tuesday is a short and we all leave early, we only have this class for two more days. Tomorrow, due to popular request, I’m going to screen a few of my films I made during college. This will be the first time I will screen my films to a classroom since 2006. It’s been 9 years, but damn, I’m still nervous. That’s crazy, right? I hope they like it. It should be fun… I hope.

I went back today and looked through a few of the films I helped create with my friends back in college and those films from my friends I had nothing to do with, and they were all so good and fun and nostalgic to watch. I had so much fun during college, and this drama class has brought back a lot of those old feelings. It was so much fun teaching these kids something I love so much, and then watching them all apply it in a film of their own made me feel proud for all of them. It was so great. And then those films from college, both mine and my friends, also gave me a lot of those feelings. All these films were made 7-9 years ago, and that is a long time ago but it really feels like yesterday. I miss film school and my friends. I miss creating with them and laughing with them and making something together. If there was any reason why I’d move back to LA…

I’m a novelist now, though. I’ve been working on renaming my characters, but finding new names for them has been tough. Why would I want to rename them? Their names are super generic and they don’t “place” the character’s in the reader’s minds very well. They’re Jimmy and Katie and Michael and so on. One thing I’ve come across during my research is how names are linked to a culture, from Gaelic to Latin to Yiddish. That has made me look at my characters in a deeper way. Who are they? Where do they come from? Where do their parents come from? I mean, they named their children what they named them for a reason, and if I understand them, I understand my characters, my children. It’s all very internal and possibly too vague to understand, but it’s something I’m going through, and important enough for me to write.

I’ve been writing seriously for over ten years now. Time is moving by too quickly! I mean, I just turned 29 years old a few weeks ago, and now I’m almost 30. I still need to get married and have kids and buy a house and make it in my career and a million other things I can’t even think of, but I’m writing a blog instead. Priorities! I’m an adult now! I gotta do what I gotta do!

All I needed was a change in attitude. I’m doing many of the same things as I did during the days leading up to my burn out, but I feel more relaxed. I think a big reason for that is that I’m finished with my novel, but even though I haven’t written anything new since finishing it on Monday, I’m still working on it. My morning routine is the same, I’m still working out and reading in the afternoons, and these entries are still getting written. Yet I feel more relaxed. It’s awesome and I don’t want to ruin it, but I’m always curious as to why I feel certain ways in an effort to better understand myself. I doubt I’ll be successful tonight, but for lack of anything else to write, lets see what I can come up with.

I’m letting myself have more fun than in the past. Mostly that just means watching more TV. I’m watching the Gilmore Girls on Netflix, and I’m in love with everything about this show, especially Lauren Graham, the lead actress, and the incredible writing. It’s so good. I like coming home from work, lying in bed, and hitting play on something to watch. It’s a great way to unwind, and I didn’t realize how much I needed it. It was nice to spend that time writing since I was able to finish my novel two months ahead of schedule, but man, at what cost? So I like this time for myself after spending eight hours at work, especially since I have to work out right after. So TV has been great. What else?

One thing I’ve mentioned before is my revamped OmniFocus perspectives. My Today list, which is my main list and the one I live off of every day, has been simplified. Simply seeing fewer tasks on this list has made me feel freer and less burdened to do more. It’s great feeling this way, and I really believe this has affected my mood more than I would have thought. Of course, I have a new list called Next where I have some of those tasks that used to be in my Today perspective, plus a helluva lot more, but this list doesn’t hold much, if any, mental weight. It’s actually great seeing everything that’s still “open” in one place. I have been going through it, reading my tasks, and choosing one or two to do each day, and it’s nice. I’m choosing to do these rather than having to do them, and that difference is everything. My Today list has things I must do because those are the things that are most important to me and adhere to my principles. The other stuff would be great to do and make me happy if they’re done, but they’re not essential and there isn’t a time limit on any of them.

Having fun and reducing my daily burden has helped me be happier and still get stuff done. I don’t know how long this will last — nothing lasts forever, unfortunately — but for now, I’m happy and that’s my main focus right now.

It feels good to be back. The routine is sound, except I’m still figuring out how to properly implement my novel rewrite into my day because I’m not too sure how I’m going to approach the rewrite yet. I came up with some good ideas today that I hope to implement in the coming days and weeks and just see how they feel and work. I’ve never rewritten a novel before. This current version of my novel was supposed to be a rewrite of my last novel, but I started it from scratch and in doing so, it became something completely new. Now I like this draft a lot, and I want to make it better. It’s fun but difficult and a little bit overwhelming.

If there’s one thing today taught me is that it’s good to give yourself a break when you need it. I didn’t write 300 words this morning (for obvious reasons), and I didn’t beat myself at all for not having a plan already in place and me implementing it as much as possible. I should be okay with simply letting myself think, and that’s what I did, and I feel good about it. I’ve been relying too much on quantifying everything, and that has setup unmanageable expectations for myself. I need to relax, get my work done, and have some fun. I can see the progress I’ve made in the past eight months with all 470 pages of my novel printed out and ready to be worked on. I know the work I do now can be used as a template for all future rewrites. I should take it slow and make sure I do it right. No rush.

Here are the few ideas I had about my rewrite plan: outline my novel so I can see what I have and see where I can improve it; write new scenes and put them in where I think they should go; and rewrite one or two scenes a day. This last one seems super attractive to me because that’s something I can easily quantify, but it’s last on my list because I don’t want to do something if it’s not right for my project yet. I really think I should outline my novel first and work on the structure, the pacing, the beats, everything like that before I go in and fiddle with the revision phase. The plot needs work, the characters need work, my sentences need work, it all needs work. Again, I’m excited but overwhelmed.

The past few weeks have also been unkind to my weight. Yesterday I weighed myself, and I gained three pounds from the previous week. I weighed myself again this morning and I weighed 2.2 lbs less than yesterday. Overall, I’m up about three pounds since April, and this has made me feel guilty. I shouldn’t be, though. I’ll lose this weight within the next few weeks, but even if I don’t, I still look great. I feel slower, though, but that’s just because I haven’t been working out as much as I used to. Again, I shouldn’t let a quantified life interfere with my mood or progress. It’s going to be hard since I’m so used to doing it, but if my goal is to find a balance that will keep me productive but extremely happy, it’s worth doing, and it’s worth doing right.